Board of Regents

Jeremy Jaech named to UW Board of Regents

Jeremy Jaech has been named to the University of Washington Board of Regents by Governor Christine Gregoire, replacing Bill Gates Sr., whose term expired at the end of September 2012.

Jeremy is our region’s leading serial software entrepreneur. He co-founded Aldus Corporation – the inventor of desktop publishing – which was acquired by Adobe. He then co-founded Visio Corporation – constraint-based drawing – which was acquired by Microsoft. He currently serves as co-founder and CEO of WatchFrog, which uses sensor technology developed by UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel and his students to monitor home hazards.

UW College of Engineering Diamond Awards

Ten Allen School alumni have received College of Engineering Diamond Awards. The Diamond Awards honors outstanding alumni and friends who have made significant contributions to the field of engineering in five categories: Distinguished Achievement in Academia, Distinguished Achievement in Industry, Entrepreneurial Excellence, Distinguished Service, and Early Career Achievement.

2016

The recipient of the 2016 Diamond Award for Early Career achievement is 2007 UW CSE BS alum Ben Hindman. Few people outside the tech industry have heard of Apache Mesos, software that provides essential infrastructure enabling applications to interact with data servers. But for anyone who has asked Apple’s Siri a question, used Yelp to look up restaurants, or watched a movie on Netflix, Mesos has helped to provide the resulting content with speed, ease and reliability. Ben is the co-creator of Mesos technology and founder of the company Mesosphere. In the ten years since graduating from the UW, he has transformed the way software runs within data centers, the backbone of some of the most popular applications in the world, and sparked an innovative new technology industry.

2015

The recipient of the 2015 Diamond Award for Distinguished Service is 2012 UW CSE PhD alum Yaw Anokwa. In places where there is no clean water or reliable power, one will often find mobile phones and Internet access. Yaw’s work explores how to use the availability of that technology to improve the lives of the under served. Yaw has established an international reputation in the field of ICTD (Information and Communication Technology for Development), led the creation of the ICTD research community at UW (involving students and faculty from several department in the College and beyond), played a central role in the development of Open Data Kit, ODK Clinic, and OpenMRS (widely used mobile computing tools that are improving the lives of people around the world), and now propels the use of ODK through the startup Nafundi.

The recipient of the 2015 Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement is 2003 UW CSE Bachelors alum Christophe Bisciglia. In the decade since his UW graduation, Christophe has had a successful career as a Google engineer, brought Google-scale Google-style computing to universities around the globe, and co-founded two of Silicon Valley's game-changing "big data" companies, Cloudera and WibiData (where he serves as CEO). He has been on the cover of Business Week as "Google's master of 'cloud' computing," and been profiled by Fortune as one of "10 Fascinating Googlers" and as the "Smartest Engineer" in a "Smartest People in Tech" feature.

2014

Brad Fitzpatrick is perhaps best known as the creator of LiveJournal, an internet tool that helped popularize blogging in the internet age and one of the earliest social networks. His Memcached technology, created to support LiveJournal's exploding user community, is used today by all major-scale web services including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia and Craigslist.

Brad started programming at the age of 5 and became an entrepreneur by 17 when he founded his first company, Voting Booth (later FreeVote) in high school. Brad created the precursor to LiveJournal before enrolling at the UW. Originally a tool to help him stay connected with friends after leaving for college, his database-driven invention grew into an 8-million strong community. To keep up with the rapid growth of LiveJournal users, Brad created Memcached, software that speeds up data access to back-end servers. His clever program allowed LiveJournal to support a large scale of users without exponentially increasing resources. Today, Memcached is an essential component of practically every major web service, and an example of Brad's impact as a software engineer, designer and innovator. When Brad graduated from the UW, LiveJournal became his full time job before selling the company, by then called Danga Interactive, to Six Apart in 2005. At Six Apart, Brad developed OpenID, an open standard authentication system that allowed users to consolidate their digital identities across different sites. Approximately 9 million sites have integrated OpenID customer support with over 1 billion OpenID-enabled accounts on the internet.

Brad stayed with Six Apart as chief architect until 2007 when he left for Google. At Google, Brad has worked on Social Graph API, Google Profiles, Android Performance and is currently with the Go Programming Language team. He is frequently asked to speak at conferences and user groups. Brad is a widely respected leader in the open-source community, improving software development culture and creating open source projects used by millions of web sites around the world.

2013

Picture an excited group of kids, working together on robots and learning math, science, and team skills in a fun and challenging project. You can thank Kevin Ross for Washington's entry to FIRST Robotics. While working as a senior design engineer at Microsoft, Kevin became concerned that enthusiasm seemed to be declining among entry-level engineers just out of college. While book-smart, they lacked passion.

Around the same time, Kevin began volunteering as a mentor for a high school robotics team as part of the nationwide FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) program. He saw in these students the spark of passion that makes not just engineers, but passionate practitioners of engineering. In 2002 he founded Washington FIRST Robotics, focused on inspiring K-12 students to become science and technology leaders. WFR's primary method to engage students is through a technology-oriented team sport involving robotic competitions. These competitions encourage students to explore, understand, and become excited about science and engineering by building robots, working in teams, and competing statewide and nationally.

Washington FIRST Robotics works with over 7,500 students and 2000 volunteers in Washington State and matches student groups with mentors to provide high quality experiences. Their goal is to have a FIRST robotics team available for every student in the state of Washington. Kevin and Washington FIRST Robotics are changing lives across our state—inspiring the engineers of the future.

2012

At age seven, Greg Badros got his first computer, a Commodore Vic-20. By age fourteen, he had published his first professional article ("GEOS Directory Printer") in COMPUTE!'s Gazette. Greg went on to Duke University where, in his junior year, his team placed first in the US in the highly prestigious ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. That success helped him land a summer internship with the Excel group at Microsoft. He graduated from Duke magna cum laude with a bachelor of science in mathematics and computer science.

Immediately after college, Greg founded the engineering team of Transworld Numerics, Inc. where he worked as senior research scientist. In the fall of ’96 he started the Ph.D. graduate program in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at UW. While at UW he received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Greg tied a department record by finishing his PhD 3 years and 8 months after starting the program. Although it took 11 years, his Ph.D. thesis on constraint algorithms applied to user interfaces recently made its first appearance in a consumer product: Apple adopted the Cassowary algorithm into the UI builder in its latest version of OS X, Lion.

After UW, Greg worked at Go2Net (later acquired by InfoSpace, Inc.) as Chief Technical Architect. He went on to join the systems lab at Google and then led the AdSense engineering team in that advertising business’s growth from $200 million to over $4 billion per year. Later at Google, as senior director of engineering, he led several of the consumer apps including Gmail, Calendar, and Reader.

In 2009, Greg joined Facebook as an engineering director where one of his first tasks was to scale the technology behind the advertising systems to hundreds of billions of impressions per day. He is now Vice President for Products & Engineering and leads several key areas at Facebook including advertising, search and data science.

Anne Condon is the Head of the computer science department at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Condon’s current research focuses on computational prediction of RNA and DNA structure and folding pathways. She regularly collaborates with molecular biologists and chemists to design and program DNA and RNA molecules with novel functions. Condon’s doctoral dissertation on game-like computational models won an ACM Distinguished Dissertation award, presented to the best one or two dissertations in the nation.

Condon is a distinguished academic committed to advancing her field. She is equally passionate about increasing the participation of women in computing research. Condon was a longstanding member of the Computer Research Association’s Committee on Women in Computer Science and Engineering (CRA-W) which implements research mentoring, community building, and information sharing projects. She coordinated the Distributed Mentoring Project, which matches undergraduate women with mentors. She held the NSERC/General Motors Canada Chair for Women in Science and Engineering for British Columbia and the Yukon (2004-2009). She won the 2010 Computing Research Association's Habermann Award for outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the participation and successes of underrepresented groups in the computing research community.

Condon received her BSc degree from University College Cork, Ireland and her PhD from the UW. She was a faculty member at University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1987 until 1999 and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Science at UBC from 2007 to 2010. In addition to the dissertation award, Condon has won an NSF National Young Investigator Award and the University College Cork Distinguished Alumna Award.

2010

Anyone delighted by animated films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Cars, or amazed, thrilled, or fascinated by Jurassic Park, Titanic, and The Matrix, can thank Loren Carpenter. This internationally recognized pioneer in computer graphics has exerted game-changing impact on the entire film industry and other digital media.

Carpenter created the world’s first fractal movie in 1980, a two-minute aerial zoom through a mountain range, accomplished by a set of algorithms based on fractal geometry that for the first time allowed computer rendering of complex landscapes and objects. Previously such a two-minute flyby scene would have required nearly 3000 hand-drawn frames. At the time, he was a graphics expert at Boeing with a desire to create realistic landscapes as a backdrop for airplane videos. This demo film, Vol Libre, won a rare standing ovation at a major computer graphics conference and landed him a new position with Lucasfilms, where he applied his technology to the famed “Genesis” scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Carpenter has been chief scientist at Pixar since 1986, when the company spun off from Lucasfilms. He and Pixar colleagues took computer animation to new heights by perfecting graphics for texture mapping, programmable shading, and other effects. Pixar’s RenderMan software is the technical heart of every Academy Award visual effects winner of the past 15 years. Carpenter and two colleagues have their own Oscar, awarded in 2001 for RenderMan.

Carpenter and his wife, Rachel, also founded their own company, Cinematrix, focused on his patented interactive entertainment system that allows large audiences to play a variety of games together and experience another level of human-computer interaction.

Tapan Parikh is transforming the world’s poorest areas by harnessing and translating technology. Since his UW graduate school days, Parikh has worked in both rural India and Guatemala to address problems that hinder the open market. Working collaboratively with communities, he designs, evaluates, and deploys appropriate information systems that support sustainable economic development.

In India Parikh realized that the efforts of microfinance groups suffered from poor paper-based record keeping. He developed cell phone software that allows a user to take a bar code picture. The interface then automatically prompts the user, with voice prompts for the illiterate, to input the numbers. The result is greater transparency, accurate record keeping, and a higher loan success rate. It's a technique he also used in Guatemala, where he retrofitted cell phones so coffee growers can find the best bean prices and document their aid needs.

MIT’s Technology Review in 2007 named Parikh “Humanitarian of the Year” and a top innovator under the age of 35. He has received Intel and NSF fellowships and in 2008 was recognized as one of Esquire's “Best and Brightest.” Parikh is an assistant professor at Berkeley’s School of Information and holds an affiliate appointment in the UW’s Computer Science & Engineering department. He has a Sc.B. degree in molecular modeling with honors from Brown University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Washington.

2008

Starting with a two-year technical degree in Ireland, Rob Short rose to become a major executive in the world’s largest software company, responsible for the world’s most influential software system, Windows. Short grew up in Cork, Ireland, where he studied electrical engineering at a technical training school. He then took a job as a technician at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

His life changed dramatically when a manufacturing problem brought one of Digital’s very best hardware engineers to Ireland. Short’s curiosity and desire to learn made quite an impression, and Short was invited to join the team at the DEC headquarters in Massachusetts, at that time home to the best engineering team in the computer world. During this exciting era, DEC began to design a next-generation computer system, the VAX-11/780, which would transform educational and industrial computing for over a decade. Short’s impressive work generated another invitation—to join the newly created DECwest Engineering team in Washington as hardware expert and principal engineer. The group was building an advanced (even by today’s standards) real-time operating system for which Short designed the processor.

In 1988 Short and other DEC members joined Microsoft, a move that literally revolutionized the world by catapulting the PC industry forward. Short led the team that built the hardware for the Windows/NT operating system and helped invent the concepts enabling the creation of modern portable operating systems. Short played a significant role in developing “Plug and Play” (one of his 12 patents), which enormously simplified the human–computer interface for home PC users and made practical today’s easy-to-use USB devices. Short was named corporate vice president for Windows Core Technology at Microsoft in 2000, a position he held until December 2007. He holds an MS in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington.

Gail Murphy has been recognized as one of the strongest and most promising researchers of her generation in computer science. The focus of her highly regarded research and teaching is software engineering. During the ten years since receiving her PhD, she has made significant contributions to understanding and reducing the problems associated with large evolving software systems. Her work provides software developers with tools that enable them to manage, evolve, and collaborate on the structure of the systems they are developing at design time and in source code.

Murphy is a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where she stands out for building a world-class research program from the ground up. She is a highly valued advisor to many graduate and undergraduate students, almost all of whom have gone on to research positions in industry and academia. Murphy challenges students to look at new things with a disciplined, questioning eye.

Her academic honors include a NSERC Staecie Fellowship, the most prestigious award for young scientists and engineers in Canada; the CRA-W Anita Borg Early Career Award, which recognizes work in academia and industrial research labs that advances women in the computing research community; the Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize from AITO, which recognizes the potential of young researchers; and a UBC Killam Research Fellowship. She received a BSc degree in computing science from the University of Alberta, and MS and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington.

2007

Ed Felten is one of the nation’s most effective public advocates for technical innovation and secure computing. He is a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University and directs the university’s Center for Information Technology Policy. His highly regarded research in computer security and privacy spans operating systems, programming languages, Internet software, and media and consumer products. In the policy arena he focuses on intellectual property and the impacts of technology regulation. His public advocacy work explores the ways in which government and industry attempt to limit technological innovation. Felten has been a lead expert witness in high-profile technology cases, has testified on technology issues before Senate and House committees, consults for government and industry, and has recently examined the security of electronic voting. In 2004 Scientific American named him to its list of 50 worldwide science and technology leaders. His academic honors have included an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and an NSF Young Investigator Award. Felten holds a BS in Physics from Cal Tech and an MS and PhD in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington.

2006

Millions of people satisfy their curiosity every day by using Jeff Dean’s handiwork. Jeff has helped to develop and implement three generations of Google’s Web crawling, indexing and query serving systems—covering two and three orders of magnitude growth in number of documents searched, number of queries handled per second, and frequency of updates to the system. He is now a Google Fellow in the systems infrastructure group. Jeff earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics from the University of Minnesota, then went to work for the World Health Organization, developing software to help fight the HIV pandemic. After receiving a PhD in computer science from the UW in 1996, he spent three years with Digital Equipment Corporation, working on projects including web-based information retrieval. Jeff joined Google in 1999.

In the past 20 years Jeremy has had a hand in the startups of Aldus (acquired by Adobe), Visio (acquired by Microsoft) and now Trumba. New ways of working have sprung from his revolutionary products: PageMaker ushered in desktop publishing and Visio was the first mass-market business drawing and diagramming software. Now Jeremy is president and CEO of Trumba, which provides shared online calendaring for subscribers and the groups to which they belong. A Richland native, he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer science at the UW. He co-chaired the capital campaign to build the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, and he currently chairs the Campaign UW communications committee. In addition, Jeremy serves on the boards of RealNetworks, Alibre Inc. and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.